. ..it certainly can't be useful for anything more than email, considering that OS X ran miserably on existing hardware when officially released in 2001 [macdailynews.com]. (And if your wife is running OS 9, then your comparison is even more ridiculous and irrelevant.)
Are you trying to tell me that my 8.5 box doesn't do everything now that it did then? Nevermind my System 7 box, which can't even do email, seeing as it isn't even net connected, because it's too busy doing useful things.
I suppose I can't include my orginal issue Compaq transportable in the equation though, which is too bad. Until it died physically a few years ago DOS was doing useful business work. In fact the core work of my business (timing and scoring racing events; as well as a considerable amount of text editing).
A tool is a tool. If it does the job, it's a Good Tool(tm). A Good Tool you've already capitalized is a Valuable Tool.
Now, as for suing end-users who unknowingly bought a pirated design, well, that's like suing teenagers for buying what they thought were real music CDs from their neighborhood music store or pawn shop.
Traditionally this would not be allowed. Copyrights do not address possession, they are copyrights.
But the law creeps, and one of the more pernicious ways it has found to creep of late is the redefinition of words with well understood legal meaning for the purposes of a single bill:
"For the purposes of this bill when we say "cat" we mean dog and when we say "dog" we mean your sister."
Thus it is now sometimes necesssary to build a glossary just for a single law to be able to read it and understand what it means. Black's is a useless anachronism for these bills.
And you can blame one of the granddaddies of the modern slippery slopes; the "war" on child pornography.
You see, the justification of anti-child pornography laws is the direct harm to children. The harm comes in the production, not in the possession. In the production illegal abusive acts are actually perpetrated against actual children. The mere images actually had an umbra of Constitutional rights about them.
So to arrest and convict a child pornographer you had to actually catch them in the production phase committing an actual illegal act. Doing something proscribed to a child.
But criminals have this nasty habit of hiding their crimes. The bastards. Catching them was difficult. It required investigative police work. We hate doing that, especially in this case where it often required cooperation across international legal frontiers.
So a new law was created to get at them without having to actually get at them directly. Promotion of child pornography was made a crime. This stretched the law a considerable bit, but didn't go so far as to actually break it. Now the word "promotion" has specific legal meaning. Distribution, sales and directly related activities. Ya know, "promotion."
The idea being that by making the business too risky and breaking the profit chain production would be curtailed and we could now go after a broader range of activities much easier to see, since promotion is harder to hide than production, since, well, to promote you have to promote. Become visible to your customers somehow.
Funny thing is, the law didn't work. Oh, sure, a lot of porn store owners were arrested and convicted of promoting child pornography, but production, i.e. actual abusive crimes against actual children, didn't diminish, at least in part because the increased strictures increased the profitabilty (see the war on drugs we're morally opposed to for some reason), thus justifying the increased risks involved. Go figure that strengthing contraban strictures only serves to strengthen the black market. We never saw that coming.
Something "had to be done," and here's what that something was:
They passed an anti child pornography bill that, for the purposes of that bill only, redefined "promotion" to include purchase, because if something is shown to be ineffective the obvious cure is to do it more and harder. This didn't merely break the law, it literally twisted it into unrecongnizability.
But here's the really pernicious step:
Possession was then held to be defacto evidence of "promotion" as defined in the bill. To have it, you must first have recieved it (this is not only a fracture of law, but of logic, but, weeeeeeell, they're just scum, right?)
So now some poor schmuck with a picture of some kid that gives a judge a hard on is "guilty" of the crime of possession, even though possession is not a crime (and with the side effect that often there is no actual primary crime even involved in the matter, an actual criminal act against an actual child. We now simply need to make a moral judgement against an image to convict).
Put 'er to work and I guarundamntee she'll learn to eat.
. ..that often fatal disease we call fame.
In this case simply a secondary symptom of the primary chronic disease; Spoiled Little Rich Girl.
Girls with some muscle are hot.
I have a predilection for what might well be termed "China Dolls." Slender women. But it should be noted that China is hard. My 105 lb., size 5 wife could take me 9 out of 10 arm wrestling; and I'm no example of the flabby geek stereotype (although it should be noted that my specialties are cycling and Tai Chi, not weight lifting).
. . . in a rational society the people would just legalize drugs and prostitution and the problem goes away tomorrow.
Oh, yeah, right. I know your kind. You're the kind that thinks sin is God's jurisdiction, not your neighbor's. Well, your neighbors have ways of dealing with your kind:
Then they'd invent heavy makeup so they didn't look quite so much like the farm animals. People who think these women are attractive are obviously looking no deeper than the artificial skins of cloth and goo. The clothes are not the woman.
By the way, feeding just makes you fat. It's the work itself that makes you strong. Weight is not the same thing as muscle and after an atrophy event ( say a prolonged illness) you need exercise to put actual meat on your bones, not more food, which will only add flab.
Put the girls right to work pitching hay to the cattle and they'll beef up. Just try to remeber that the ones in the dresses are probably the girls.
Until the Chinese can get the facts and figures straight/correct, punishing outside news agencies for reporting something differently than the "official story" is ridiculous.
I am not sure you fully understand that the official story is the correct one.
Companies that go public should understand that they are selling their souls to the same people that brought us our current gov't, laws, etc.
Which is why that is one of the major issues I opposed. We could have remained closely held and earned our own way, but the lure of "free" money was too much for most of the rest of the board (especially for the FDR, Red Diaper Babies our board got packed with. Go figure).
We simply haven't found a way to identify these guys and put them in the top jobs. Unless they build the company themselves, they never get there.
My own experience as a director is that these people, for the most part, are quite easily identified by boards and rejected, often quite adamantly, by them.
Big business now runs on the concept of replacable mediocrity, extending right up to the level of the company president. A good, strong leader is hard to replace and thus leaves a hole behind when he/she leaves (noticable publicly by the dramatic dip in the stock price). They create a corporate culture that is very much centered around their personality (see Microsoft) so that even the public views the leader and the company as one and the same.
This is anethma to the corporate board. What they're looking for is the effective dullard. The sort of person who can work the system well enough to get a degree in history from an Ivy League school, but remain ignorant of history in practice, because they never actually understood the material they were studying. The sort of person with strong, but simple ideas who will be intellectually content with just keeping the gears of the system turning smoothly.
The schools currently pump this sort of person out by the container full, so if you lose one you can just go grab yourself another and the boat (and the stock prices) doesn't rock much in the process.
I haven't sat on a board for years now and the last time I was effectively ousted, from a company I cofounded (to continue a preexisting sole proprietorship in corporate clothing whose orginal founder had died). I rocked the boat. I made public statements that the majority of the board didn't like ( I never "leaked." I always talked directly to the press for attribution). I created discord without anything productive coming out of it because I was out of line with the majority view.
And in a sense the board was right to get rid of me, I didn't belong there. The company has grown smoothly and continues to thrive and grow under distinctly mediocre, largely invisible, but nominally effective, leadership, which has changed hands a few times without much of anyone even noticing that it was going on.
. ..shits and giggles hacking is different than tool/product development. It usually stems from looking at stuff you've just got lying around and thinking "Ohhhhhh, hey!"
For instance, I used to have a baby brother who suddenly noticed that he had an M80, four cans of ether and a roll of duct tape. . .
No, he doesn't get the job if he maxes out his credit cards and then never makes payments on them.
To pay off Suzy's cancer debt is why I need the job, having had to leave the previous one to help take care of Suzy. Applying for the job in the first place is an indication that I'm trying to apply some fiscal responsibility to my life.
Yes, there are many, many people who simply think of credit cards as "free" money and never have any clear idea of how to pay them off in the first place, but then there really are people who had both the intention and clear means to pay them off at the time the debt was acquired, but shit just plain happened to them.
If they cannot get good jobs to get back on track, they can't get back on track.
OK, two engineers over four coffee breaks, plus 50 managers over 100 meetings.
Once upon a time Ford introduced a new car model. It was their first offering with a spring loaded hood ornament to prevent breakage. It was not until the car was introduced at a show in its final form that it was discovered that the ornament could be bent down far enough to cause a scratch in the paint. There was much consternation over this, as they figured it would take three years to fix the problem in production.
That's why I prefer to work as an independent who could fix it in half a coffee break.
. ..sell his product: HIS vision of the situation.
Well, just whose point of view do you expect him to present?
"Ladies and Gentlemen of the jury, although I wish you to find my client not guilty let me go over some points that the prosecution has raised, as I think they are entirely valid. .."
With sufficient research ( and government grants) scienctists hope to invent something they call a "trolley," although I think the idea is perhaps too futuristic and we aren't ready for it.
. ..that is a one time cost for the most part, not the operating cost. ..
How long does High School last?
Four years.
How long does a standard eternity last?
Three years.
They'll be scraping nearly the whole thing before these incoming students graduate, and need $150 mil to update.
Plus the decorating costs when they finally figure out that all that "clean" and "modern" white shit is driving people fucking nuts.
And it it just me, or is the Student --> Learner; Teacher --> Educator nomenclature shift about the most pointless that anyone has come up with yet?
"No sir, those aren't my "cat" and "dog." They're my "feline" and "canine." Why yes, I am illiterate, why do you ask? Yeah, I'm an "educator," so what? The answers are all in the computer anyway, why do I have to know anything?"
Heck, even in the 20'th century, with all the medicine and hygiene and all, most people didn't live to the age of 90.
As noted above I meant to say 70, but 90 slipped out somehow. People in modern NYC City are a lot less likely to get eaten by crocodiles, but then the ancient Egyptian was a lot less likely to fly into a skyscraper.
. ..if you're trying to tell me that ancient Egypt had it even better. ..
Slashdot Mirror
. . .it certainly can't be useful for anything more than email, considering that OS X ran miserably on existing hardware when officially released in 2001 [macdailynews.com]. (And if your wife is running OS 9, then your comparison is even more ridiculous and irrelevant.)
Are you trying to tell me that my 8.5 box doesn't do everything now that it did then? Nevermind my System 7 box, which can't even do email, seeing as it isn't even net connected, because it's too busy doing useful things.
I suppose I can't include my orginal issue Compaq transportable in the equation though, which is too bad. Until it died physically a few years ago DOS was doing useful business work. In fact the core work of my business (timing and scoring racing events; as well as a considerable amount of text editing).
A tool is a tool. If it does the job, it's a Good Tool(tm). A Good Tool you've already capitalized is a Valuable Tool.
KFG
Now, as for suing end-users who unknowingly bought a pirated design, well, that's like suing teenagers for buying what they thought were real music CDs from their neighborhood music store or pawn shop.
Traditionally this would not be allowed. Copyrights do not address possession, they are copyrights.
But the law creeps, and one of the more pernicious ways it has found to creep of late is the redefinition of words with well understood legal meaning for the purposes of a single bill:
"For the purposes of this bill when we say "cat" we mean dog and when we say "dog" we mean your sister."
Thus it is now sometimes necesssary to build a glossary just for a single law to be able to read it and understand what it means. Black's is a useless anachronism for these bills.
And you can blame one of the granddaddies of the modern slippery slopes; the "war" on child pornography.
You see, the justification of anti-child pornography laws is the direct harm to children. The harm comes in the production, not in the possession. In the production illegal abusive acts are actually perpetrated against actual children. The mere images actually had an umbra of Constitutional rights about them.
So to arrest and convict a child pornographer you had to actually catch them in the production phase committing an actual illegal act. Doing something proscribed to a child.
But criminals have this nasty habit of hiding their crimes. The bastards. Catching them was difficult. It required investigative police work. We hate doing that, especially in this case where it often required cooperation across international legal frontiers.
So a new law was created to get at them without having to actually get at them directly. Promotion of child pornography was made a crime. This stretched the law a considerable bit, but didn't go so far as to actually break it. Now the word "promotion" has specific legal meaning. Distribution, sales and directly related activities. Ya know, "promotion."
The idea being that by making the business too risky and breaking the profit chain production would be curtailed and we could now go after a broader range of activities much easier to see, since promotion is harder to hide than production, since, well, to promote you have to promote. Become visible to your customers somehow.
Funny thing is, the law didn't work. Oh, sure, a lot of porn store owners were arrested and convicted of promoting child pornography, but production, i.e. actual abusive crimes against actual children, didn't diminish, at least in part because the increased strictures increased the profitabilty (see the war on drugs we're morally opposed to for some reason), thus justifying the increased risks involved. Go figure that strengthing contraban strictures only serves to strengthen the black market. We never saw that coming.
Something "had to be done," and here's what that something was:
They passed an anti child pornography bill that, for the purposes of that bill only, redefined "promotion" to include purchase, because if something is shown to be ineffective the obvious cure is to do it more and harder. This didn't merely break the law, it literally twisted it into unrecongnizability.
But here's the really pernicious step:
Possession was then held to be defacto evidence of "promotion" as defined in the bill. To have it, you must first have recieved it (this is not only a fracture of law, but of logic, but, weeeeeeell, they're just scum, right?)
So now some poor schmuck with a picture of some kid that gives a judge a hard on is "guilty" of the crime of possession, even though possession is not a crime (and with the side effect that often there is no actual primary crime even involved in the matter, an actual criminal act against an actual child. We now simply need to make a moral judgement against an image to convict).
And they got a
I wasn't trying to attack you or your role. . .
.the pop business book "Built to Last" . . .
No problemo.
. .
Might pop that one on the To Read list, but admit I'll give Cicero preference.
Do you have it blogged/described in more detail anywhere?
People keep asking me to. I keep saying no. I post on Slashdot. Very low pundit factor that way. I like that.
KFG
You need to eat AND work to build muscle.
.that often fatal disease we call fame.
Put 'er to work and I guarundamntee she'll learn to eat.
. .
In this case simply a secondary symptom of the primary chronic disease; Spoiled Little Rich Girl.
Girls with some muscle are hot.
I have a predilection for what might well be termed "China Dolls." Slender women. But it should be noted that China is hard. My 105 lb., size 5 wife could take me 9 out of 10 arm wrestling; and I'm no example of the flabby geek stereotype (although it should be noted that my specialties are cycling and Tai Chi, not weight lifting).
KFG
. . . in a rational society the people would just legalize drugs and prostitution and the problem goes away tomorrow.
."
Oh, yeah, right. I know your kind. You're the kind that thinks sin is God's jurisdiction, not your neighbor's. Well, your neighbors have ways of dealing with your kind:
"Noooooobody expects. .
KFG
Then they'd invent heavy makeup so they didn't look quite so much like the farm animals. People who think these women are attractive are obviously looking no deeper than the artificial skins of cloth and goo. The clothes are not the woman.
By the way, feeding just makes you fat. It's the work itself that makes you strong. Weight is not the same thing as muscle and after an atrophy event ( say a prolonged illness) you need exercise to put actual meat on your bones, not more food, which will only add flab.
Put the girls right to work pitching hay to the cattle and they'll beef up. Just try to remeber that the ones in the dresses are probably the girls.
KFG
. . .this activity cannot accurately be referred to as 'phishing'.
Maybe it's the next gen "having an ice cream cone," or the next gen "going to the movies."
At the very least calling it one of those would make just about as much sense as calling it "phishing."
KFG
Until the Chinese can get the facts and figures straight/correct, punishing outside news agencies for reporting something differently than the "official story" is ridiculous.
I am not sure you fully understand that the official story is the correct one.
KFG
Companies that go public should understand that they are selling their souls to the same people that brought us our current gov't, laws, etc.
Which is why that is one of the major issues I opposed. We could have remained closely held and earned our own way, but the lure of "free" money was too much for most of the rest of the board (especially for the FDR, Red Diaper Babies our board got packed with. Go figure).
KFG
We simply haven't found a way to identify these guys and put them in the top jobs. Unless they build the company themselves, they never get there.
My own experience as a director is that these people, for the most part, are quite easily identified by boards and rejected, often quite adamantly, by them.
Big business now runs on the concept of replacable mediocrity, extending right up to the level of the company president. A good, strong leader is hard to replace and thus leaves a hole behind when he/she leaves (noticable publicly by the dramatic dip in the stock price). They create a corporate culture that is very much centered around their personality (see Microsoft) so that even the public views the leader and the company as one and the same.
This is anethma to the corporate board. What they're looking for is the effective dullard. The sort of person who can work the system well enough to get a degree in history from an Ivy League school, but remain ignorant of history in practice, because they never actually understood the material they were studying. The sort of person with strong, but simple ideas who will be intellectually content with just keeping the gears of the system turning smoothly.
The schools currently pump this sort of person out by the container full, so if you lose one you can just go grab yourself another and the boat (and the stock prices) doesn't rock much in the process.
I haven't sat on a board for years now and the last time I was effectively ousted, from a company I cofounded (to continue a preexisting sole proprietorship in corporate clothing whose orginal founder had died). I rocked the boat. I made public statements that the majority of the board didn't like ( I never "leaked." I always talked directly to the press for attribution). I created discord without anything productive coming out of it because I was out of line with the majority view.
And in a sense the board was right to get rid of me, I didn't belong there. The company has grown smoothly and continues to thrive and grow under distinctly mediocre, largely invisible, but nominally effective, leadership, which has changed hands a few times without much of anyone even noticing that it was going on.
Shooting stars need not apply.
KFG
That cat must not have had nine lives. . .
Yeah, the lymphoma got him. Go figure.
KFG
But on the other hand...
.shits and giggles hacking is different than tool/product development. It usually stems from looking at stuff you've just got lying around and thinking "Ohhhhhh, hey!"
. .
For instance, I used to have a baby brother who suddenly noticed that he had an M80, four cans of ether and a roll of duct tape. . .
KFG
Why not use a micro drive instead or a very high capacity flash card?
Because he had a laptop drive?
KFG
I know where her touch screen has been and I wouldn't do her with somebody else's stylus.
KFG
No, he doesn't get the job if he maxes out his credit cards and then never makes payments on them.
To pay off Suzy's cancer debt is why I need the job, having had to leave the previous one to help take care of Suzy. Applying for the job in the first place is an indication that I'm trying to apply some fiscal responsibility to my life.
Yes, there are many, many people who simply think of credit cards as "free" money and never have any clear idea of how to pay them off in the first place, but then there really are people who had both the intention and clear means to pay them off at the time the debt was acquired, but shit just plain happened to them.
If they cannot get good jobs to get back on track, they can't get back on track.
KFG
OK, two engineers over four coffee breaks, plus 50 managers over 100 meetings.
Once upon a time Ford introduced a new car model. It was their first offering with a spring loaded hood ornament to prevent breakage. It was not until the car was introduced at a show in its final form that it was discovered that the ornament could be bent down far enough to cause a scratch in the paint. There was much consternation over this, as they figured it would take three years to fix the problem in production.
That's why I prefer to work as an independent who could fix it in half a coffee break.
KFG
. . .sell his product: HIS vision of the situation.
."
Well, just whose point of view do you expect him to present?
"Ladies and Gentlemen of the jury, although I wish you to find my client not guilty let me go over some points that the prosecution has raised, as I think they are entirely valid. .
KFG
I imagine that adding such a feature would inherently add some amount of extra work to their schedule . . .
One engineer on his coffee break. It's just a codec. A free, freely downloadable and fully documented codec.
KFG
Dayton exists in an alternate universe, where the laws of time and space as the rest of us understand them do not apply.
KFG
They've invented the MIT Model Railroad Club.
KFG
4) Get fools to buy it.
5) PROFIT!!
The great thing is that in 50 years you'll be able to sell the same fools cabs again, then trollies, then cabs, then. . .
All my life's a circle, sunrise and sundown. . .
KFG
You mean, like trains and subways?
With sufficient research ( and government grants) scienctists hope to invent something they call a "trolley," although I think the idea is perhaps too futuristic and we aren't ready for it.
KFG
How many shows a night do you do?
Usually just the none.
KFG
. . .that is a one time cost for the most part, not the operating cost. . .
How long does High School last?
Four years.
How long does a standard eternity last?
Three years.
They'll be scraping nearly the whole thing before these incoming students graduate, and need $150 mil to update.
Plus the decorating costs when they finally figure out that all that "clean" and "modern" white shit is driving people fucking nuts.
And it it just me, or is the Student --> Learner; Teacher --> Educator nomenclature shift about the most pointless that anyone has come up with yet?
"No sir, those aren't my "cat" and "dog." They're my "feline" and "canine." Why yes, I am illiterate, why do you ask? Yeah, I'm an "educator," so what? The answers are all in the computer anyway, why do I have to know anything?"
KFG
It's not that easy.
.if you're trying to tell me that ancient Egypt had it even better. . .
Nothing ever is.
Heck, even in the 20'th century, with all the medicine and hygiene and all, most people didn't live to the age of 90.
As noted above I meant to say 70, but 90 slipped out somehow. People in modern NYC City are a lot less likely to get eaten by crocodiles, but then the ancient Egyptian was a lot less likely to fly into a skyscraper.
. .
Now you're just being silly.
KFG